Fujitsu invests 2.5 MEcu in European IT Research Centre

London, 17-10 -1996 The Fujitsu European Centre for Information Technology, (FECIT) in Stockley Park, Uxbridge, near London Airport, UK, was formally opened on October 17. According to Dr. Uchida, its Managing Director, the initial capital budget is 2.5 MEcu a year. The centre will employ around 20 researchers of which 10 are already in place, and coming not only from Europe, but also from the USA and Japan

. FECIT forms part of Fujitsu's global manufacturing and marketing activities and its research will concentrate on parallel processing technologies collaborating with leading academic institutions and companies throughout Europe. Fujitsu knows that parallel processing is set to play an important role in IT. Europe has a long history and a wealth of advanced knowledge in parallel software technologies which Fujitsu is keen to mine for use in its future products.

Two of the organizations to collaborate on R&D with FECIT are the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and Imperial College, London. ECMWF is a leading supercomputing facility, which recently replaced its Cray systems with a Fujitsu machine and Imperial College has a long tradition in designing novel architecture computers and functional languages.

Capitalizing on European advanced software knowledge and on Fujitsus's existing expertise in supercomputing, FECIT will focus on R&D for parallel processing related technologies to advance the scientific and business high performance computing and networking of the future. As an enabling technology, HPC can open new markets in many diverse fields. Some of the applications targeted are medical imaging, virtual reality, weather forecasting, data mining, image rendering for animation and crash simulations.

Last March, ECMWF broke a twenty year habit and replaced its Cray C90's with a 47 processor Fujitsu VPP700, for their weather forecasting operations.

The VPP700 currently holds the world's highest vector processing peak performance of 1.1 TeraFlops. Harnessing this power while solving real applications is another matter. During the accpetance period, ran smoothly with an overall system availability of 99.8%.

Another Fujitsu large Fujitsu installation will be at the KTH Stockholm, were a 2.2 Gflop/s VX1 has been installed.

FECIT R&D activities

The UK operation represents about 1% of Fujitsu's R&D spending. Activities which researchers at FECIT will focus, include automatic parallelization of HPF, VPP Fortran 90 and C, as well as international efforts concerning these languages. Improving and extending parallel and parallel-vector libraries, porting new applications and developing new software to meet the emerging needs of industry.

The intention is to develop prototype software for Fujitsu's VPPs to cover areas such as, data-mining, multi-disciplinary design and optimization, financial modelling and also provide support for Fujitsu's parallel processing sales business - benchmark tests, benchmarking codes and other technical support. In the financial market they are working closely with the London Parallel Applications centre which has close contacts with the City London stock exhange.

The Fujitsu Centre is one of several centres opened in recent years by Japanese companies in High Performance Computing. NEC set up one last year, at Sankt Augustin, near Bonn in Germany. Both these research centres are used as conduits to tap advanced results from European R&D initiatives and achieve Technology Transfer on the cheap. Some would say this is a familiar story and HPCN software technologies is now up for grabs.

Chris Lazou